Fight for the Future
A scream rips through the air around me. I can’t tell where it’s coming from, but I know the voice.
Nike!
My bucket and mop hit the hard floor with a thud as I let go. Before I can start down the hall again, another cry of fear echoes off the walls.
Nike?
No, not off the walls. Through the walls. It sounds like it’s coming from inside the guest room I’ve been assigned for the night.
But how did Nike get from the shower to the bedroom without my noticing?
The chandeliers flicker above me but don’t go dark. I’m vaguely aware that my hair is standing on end, caught in static electricity. It flies up and out all over my entire head.
Then I remember. A twelve-inch-tall man with black curls for a beard and three sets of wings.
That’s it! That’s the statue that’s missing from its place on the side table where I found room for my mug and lantern. It was there twenty minutes ago, maybe less.
The scream pierces the air a third time. There’s a hollowness to it that chills me to the bone. Like it’s not quite real.
“Nike!” I shriek. Terror laces my voice.
I’m okay, I tell myself. Just got to stay out of dark rooms after midnight.
A shudder ripples down my spine. My death date, according to the charts I’ve cast, doesn’t begin for another thirty minutes. I have to act quickly. As long as I can keep the lights on from midnight until dawn, I’m safe.
But Nike isn’t.
A muffled voice, distant yet unmistakably Nike’s, echoes from the guest room where I’d flicked on the light earlier. As my mind leaps to the worst possible conclusions, my fingers curve around one statue, the one of a woman with pink and gold highlights in her chestnut-brown hair and a pair of oversized black wings on her back.
I sprint towards the sound, fear fueling my speed, and burst through the door to the bedroom where I’d left the lights on.
But everything inside is dark. And no Nike.
The door slams shut behind me before I can turn.
Time stops. Or seems to.
Didn’t I cast the charts a dozen times to be sure the date of my death had changed from ninety years and three-and-a-half months to half of that? A dozen times, the same answer. The same date: tomorrow. Tomorrow, the day before meeting the love of my life for the first time.
In my scrying for this new future Aoife crafted for me, the last thing I’d seen was the room going dark—tomorrow. The last thing I’d heard was a swish through the blackness and a thud against my skull—tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow in the Eastern time zone where I had repeatedly cast those charts.
It’s not midnight yet here, but in the Eastern time zone, tomorrow has already come.
Time seems to start again. I sense the presence behind me before I hear heavy breaths. Instinct takes over, and I drop to the floor, narrowly dodging a lethal blow that whistles over my head.
My heart pounds frantically, and I clamber to my feet, my eyes straining to penetrate the gloom. Something lurks in here with me, something unseen and deadly.
I need to act now, or this dark room may be my last memory. A rectangle of light from the corridor outlines the door behind the looming figure. He swings again, and I block his impact with the statue, tight in both my hands.
A surge of adrenaline propels me, and I lunge at the figure blocking my path to the door, taking him by surprise, throwing him off balance as I grab for the door handle and yank it open. Light floods the room as I tumble out onto the marble floor. The chandelier illuminates his dirty blond hair, held in a bun with two hair sticks, the Daeganean kind with tiny daggers hidden inside. His pale eyes look almost gold in this space between the bedroom and the hall.
I know him!
“Nike!” I scream. This man has a trick we’ve all heard about—his ability to mimic the voices of others whose energy, however old, is still present. Aoife, Illyria, Nike’s father—they’ve all been here—but Nike is the only one this man could use against me.
I may have met him a few times in the past at some Solstice Celebrations, but mostly, I remember him from the future. He’s a towering, muscular man, a priest of Aoife’s, identifiable as Fick. One of the four so-called brothers Aoife had initiated one after another to displace Jakin as the Last Priest after he cheated on her, ending with Raven Darbyshire as the Last Priest. All powerful, physically intimidating men in their mid-to-late twenties, and all but Raven still closely aligned to Aoife’s intentions and acting as bodyguards or private henchmen on her behalf.
A chilling realization grips me. An energetic residue surrounds him—he’s the one who sliced the skin sample from Terre’s corpse in the morgue. Not just any sample but the Walking Lightning tattoo with all its sizzling energy and magic. Fick may not have murdered our most powerful High Priest and mentor, but he’s definitely part of Aoife’s conspiracy to clone Terre’s body so she can resurrect Terre as the next Last Priest and possibly have control over him that she’s not managed to keep over Raven.
I scoot backward across the smooth floor. The only thing between my ass and the marble is the oversized plush bathrobe that’s not fully closed in this position. Fick doesn’t seem to notice as he pulls himself into a squat and dives in my direction, a small but heavy statue in his grip. He rolls, shoulder first, landing with a grunt on both knees and slamming down the small figure of a bearded, winged angel.
I catch it with my own statue again as I plant one bare foot in his groin and kick, then stomp his chest, knocking him backward. My statue crashes to the floor and skitters out of reach.
How did he get in? Was he here the whole time? Are there more of Aoife’s goons hiding in the house?
Huffing, Fick regains his position, but something’s wrong.
He overpowered the medical examiner easily, leaving the man with a traumatic brain injury, but he’s not been able to overpower me—yet.
Our struggle is fierce and desperate. His strength is formidable, and despite my wild fury, he’s moments away from gaining the upper hand.
I know exactly what he’s capable of. In this timeline, he assaulted the medical examiner so he could steal Terre’s DNA, and it hadn’t mattered if the man died or suffered horribly from the attack. In another timeline I recall, Fick was Aoife’s preferred assassin. If my old timeline is re-established, then one day, not too many years from now, he will murder Illyria on the orders of our Ranking High Priestess before I can take control of the priesthood.
But this time, somehow, his brute strength isn’t enough.
I roll away from him, flinging myself at the mop and bringing the handle up just as he hurls his weapon downward again. I block his thrust with the mop handle, catching it in mid-air.
To my surprise, he doesn’t force the mop handle away. He can’t. The harder I push the handle upward to hold him at bay, the harder he rams his weapon against it, but neither of us makes progress.
I don’t understand. He’s ten times more powerful physically than I was at twenty-five, and that was two decades ago. I’m not nearly as strong now as in my early years.
Yet, in this moment, I’m as strong as he is with all his muscles bulging. But how?
Out of nowhere, a jug of bleach bounces off his head. Nike runs toward us, launching herself at him with a warrior’s shriek, her bare heel striking his throat as she lands off-kilter. Before he can grab her ankle and pull her down, she seizes my cup of blistering hot chocolate and dashes it at his head. It hits his nose squarely. Scalding liquid splashes his face. China shatters on the wall behind him.
Fick bellows, claws at his eyes, and scutters backward on the marble floor until his spine hits the wall. Wiping most of the liquid away with the back of his hand, he fumbles for the hair sticks in his topknot.
Nike and I exchange horrified glances. Priests in the Daeganean order wear their long hair in a man-bun as a symbol of their commitment to our long-prophesied purpose, but their hair is held in place by these two tiny weapons. If they land well when thrown, the dagger tips are deadly.
His chest heaves as he pulls the hair daggers from his topknot, almost as if he’s too weak to hold them, let alone throw them. Hands shaking, he holds them vertically in front of him, close together, tips aligned to tips. Almost touching.
Nike and I both dive under a table, upending it as a shield and sending statues skittering across the floor.
But he doesn’t launch his weapons at us.
Already, his face is bright red and splotchy from the hot liquid. Blisters paint his cheeks above his now-broken nose. He seems to use the last ounce of his strength to hold the hair daggers upright in front of him, slowly pulling them apart until he is holding them as far apart as possible.
The air wavers between the two sticks. I can almost see a room on the other side of the ripples of blue electricity between the two sticks. A sphere forms at the center and, like a prism-veined bubble, grows until it encompasses his entire body, then stops. Everything inside the sphere flickers and fizzles.
Oh, shit.
I know what this is. I saw it as a child. Never in the future. But how would anyone else know?
I glance at Nike. Her hair, like mine, floats around her head. The air crackles through the corridor. One of the chandelier bulbs above us shatters and rains down glass behind us. The lights wink twice.
I watch, aghast and mesmerized, as the sphere flickers like a fluorescent lightbulb going bad. Then it pops, leaving nothing behind but the lingering stench of his dark magic. The energy crackles in a circle where the sphere was seconds ago.
“What the hell was that?” Nike stares at the blank spot on the floor.
“Portal.” I scramble on all fours to reach the circle before the energy evaporates.
Chanting an ancient charm straight out of a spiral-bound notebook, I pound the side of my fist on the marble, hard enough to make a fleshy thudding sound.
One, two, three times.
Then I slap down the palm of my hand, fingers together, against the marble, flattening my bind rune tattoo on my wrist against the floor. The remnants of the energy seep into the floor, gone.
All gone.
Breathing heavily, I let my shoulders droop. My body goes limp as Nike rushes to prop me up and simultaneously drag me to my feet. Instead, we both sink to the floor and lean against the wall.
“Are you all right?”
I wait for my pulse to settle so I can hear myself speak. “It’s over. He won’t come back. Not through a portal, anyway. He can’t follow my energy now that I’ve closed his gate to me.”
“There’s a gate?” Nike’s voice cracks. “Other fuckers can come through like he did?”
I don’t answer. There’s nothing I can say that won’t terrify her. Not if portal technology is no longer a secret.
“I don’t get it, Zephyr. I’ve been in the priesthood since I was, like, twelve and I’ve never seen anything like that. I’ve seen plenty of priests and hair daggers and their target practice, but I had no idea that—”
“That they function as portals just as our pearl necklaces do? Yeah. I haven’t seen that in action either except…except once when I was so young I can barely remember.”
“You mean, our rosaries are portals, too?” she squeaks, patting her pearls under her bathrobe. She’s the only person I know who refers to them in religious terms. Nike bends to inspect the blank space on the floor. She pokes at it with her index finger, then shakes her head.
“Nike—”
“I’ve used my rosary to measure perfect ritual circles in increments of nine inches to make my spells work better, and twice for scrying, and always for showing my commitment to the priesthood, but nobody told me they were portals. Shit, I’ve been walking around with a wormhole around my neck? What if something went wrong and my head ended up in another time zone or—”
“Nike—”
“Have you ever used them as a portal?”
“Nike—”
“The lab—we could’ve portaled out of there!”
“Nike! Hold your horses. First of all, yes, both hair daggers and rosaries are portals, but they’re as likely to get you killed as they are to save you. Or drain your life’s energy until you’re a husk of yourself. Or, if you overuse them, they can drive you—”
What have I done? Telling Nike about the secrets of our necklaces! It’s one thing for her to witness Fick using his hair sticks to escape, but what have I done? The journal Terre left for me specifically warned against using them to change the past without proper preparation or else it might drive the time traveler—
“Mad.”
Is that why Nike went mad in the future I remember? Trying to re-establish a timeline that includes a living, breathing, safe Illyria?
I clear my throat as I try to pull myself together. “They can transport you elsewhere, yes, but it’s your own energy that powers the portal. If you’re lucky, the portal will leave you weak as a kitten instead of killing you. So, there’s a time delay until you regain your strength, and that’s when you’re vulnerable. You can sneak up on an adversary, but you have to wait until you’re strong enough to fight them or you have to take them by surprise. Like Fick was trying to do.”
Nike’s head bobs in understanding. “He wasn’t expecting you to fight back.”
“Exactly. That’s why Fick wasn’t able to overpower me when it should have been easy for him. Why he fled from the two of us. Obviously, he traveled physically to overpower the medical examiner and steal Terre’s DNA, but to surprise me in a dark room, he didn’t need to have his full strength. And if you try to take a weapon through with you to compensate for the weakness, it disrupts the energy field. Portal technology is meant for escape or defense, not assault.”
Maybe more, but I haven’t finished reading the journal Emry had passed along to me.
“Why didn’t anyone tell me about the portals? Does everyone know but me?”
“Don’t take it personally. They were developed when I was little. In the future I remember, I never used my rosary a single time that way, but someone brought me through a portal when I was a child, and I received another pearl every birthday until I turned forty-eight. I mean, in the future I remember, I did. Terre was the one who prototyped them. Some kind of secret technology or ancient magic—no difference, really. He and another High Priest didn’t like the direction that Aoife’s grandmother was taking the priesthood when she was the leader.”
“Are there other kinds of portals?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. Terre obviously didn’t find a less dangerous way to power them, but the hair daggers and rosaries work the same. A priest or priestess can use them to open a portal to a specific person’s energy without knowing where that person is or to a specific location if they need to escape. That’s how Fick found us.”
“And how he got back?”
“Yes.” I stretch my leg to work out what’s probably a pulled muscle. I hurt all over, but I’m running on pure adrenaline.
“Does Aoife know about the portals?” Nike snaps her fingers. “Fick. I just remembered where I know him from. He’s one of Aoife’s bodyguards.”
“And errand boys. I’d say she knows. And worse, she knows now that you and I are here together, even if he was just following my energy and not knowing it would lead him here, three miles from the lab Fick took Terre’s DNA to.”
Cursing under her breath, Nike runs her fingers through her hair. “But you’re alive. Does that mean you’ve changed the future back?”
“Maybe? I don’t know. All I know is that I stopped Fick from murdering me in the dark.”
“Zephyr, you should cast some charts to see if your death date has changed.”
“Hmmm, if I’ve prevented it today, then the next malefic in my chart happens in six months.” The corridor is eerily quiet as we lock gazes.
“Then you should scry to see how your destiny has changed.” She gingerly picks herself up off the floor and extends a helping hand to me. “Come on. I’ll keep watch tonight and clean up this mess while you check out the future.”
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